By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Practically everybody expected independent India to fall apart sooner rather than later after that proud midnight moment when the British connection was severed in 1947. Of course, there was a certain sourness even to that occasion. Pakistan was born at the same time. Nationalists in both countries felt that the prize of independence had been sullied by a poor deal when the territory was divvied up. Even India, which got the lion’s share.
Actually, in all its years of recorded history, the Indian sub-continent had never been wholly or perhaps I should say uniformly united under one ruler or government. None of the pre-British empires—whether Hindu or Muslim, whether Gupta, Maurya or Moghul—that had managed to control huge swathes of South Asia, often including most of today’s Afghanistan as well, had managed to subdue every inch of territory right down to Cape Cormorin at the southern tip. And control at the farthest reaches of empire had often involved the subordination, not the destruction of preexisting states, states which tended to re-emerge when, after a few generations, an empire began to crumble. Even the English, who did dominate the whole sub-continent—though famously not Afghanistan—found it useful to work through the puppet rulers of once independent princely states in many parts of their colony.
The Hodgepodge
Thus, post-colonial India inherited a patchwork based on at least 14 major languages—major equating to French or German within Europe—and countless locally-treasured dialects and tribal languages, a consequential cultural divide between North and South and a Muslim minority exceeding the population in any Muslim country except Indonesia. And that’s not even an exhaustive catalogue of the diversity the Republic of India would have to hold together.
Was it easy to keep the country together? Not at all. Almost from the beginning, India has been jiggering its internal boundaries to keep people happy, and the most important principal of re-organization has been linguistic. In 1956, the Indian Parliament passed the States Reorganization Act which reduced the hodgepodge of A, B and C states inherited from the English period to 14 statutorily equal states. Today India has 28 states. How did that happen? By popular demand, one might say. Indians learned how to agitate during the independence movement, and they have never forgotten. In short, India’s reaction to sub-national linguistic and cultural aspirations, unlike China’s, has been to satisfy them—within the Indian union, of course. That’s the bottom line.
The Fight for Bombay
Bombay state gave rise to one of the first of these crises. This state, centered around the financial capital now known as Mumbai, was huge in area and contained two major linguistic groups, Gujaratis and Maharashtrians, who wanted separate states. That was the easy part. Both groups also wanted the city of Bombay. That was the hard part. (In those early days, the fate of Bombay seemed almost as fraught as resolving the status of Jerusalem does today.) As in all subsequent contests over statehood, there were protests, processions, strikes, police excesses, lives lost, but eventually the Center gave Bombay to Maharashtra—and guess what? The country didn’t explode. Each group of language-speakers had a state in which children could be taught the local language (along with Hindi and English) and in which local customs could be honored and passed on to the next generation. Politics continues in Maharashtra and Gujarat, of course, and often it’s a pretty nasty business, but separatism is not on the agenda.
The original state of Indian Punjab was split, not on linguistic, but on religious grounds: the resulting state of Haryana has a largely Hindu population and the portion still called Punjab is mostly Sikh. However, when a Sikh succession movement developed, it was crushed.
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